David Kirk

David Blair Kirk (Born 1960) spent more than two decades at Nvidia, joining in 1997 and serving as Chief Scientist and Vice President of Architecture until 2019, when he became an Nvidia Fellow. He co-founded Nvidia's research division and shaped the GPU architectures that made modern AI computing possible. Kirk holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Caltech, and is co-author of the widely used parallel-programming textbook 'Programming Massively Parallel Processors'. He holds nearly 100 patents in graphics and graphics hardware and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

Since leaving his executive role at Nvidia, Kirk has focused on advisory and investment work, including a Venture Partner position at DigitalDx Ventures from 2019 and board roles at several technology companies. In June 2026 he was named among the angel investors in NewOrbit Space's oversubscribed $18.5m Series A, backing the UK startup's plans to commercialise very low Earth orbit, the 150-to-250km altitude band that has largely been left unused because of atmospheric drag .

Kirk's involvement signals the GPU compute community's interest in VLEO as the next compute-adjacent infrastructure layer. Low-orbit Earth observation and communications both depend on onboard processing power; the compute constraints that VLEO satellites face are directly in the problem space Kirk spent thirty years solving.